Garden.com and other online retailers are changing direct marketing—including the look and function of the mail order catalog

By Melissa Sepos

Reluctant to provide specific conversion numbers, Sharples merely quips that if the catalog experiment hadn’t worked, her company wouldn’t have purchased Earthmade and produced two more catalogs.

But Garden.com doesn’t keep its catalog customers for long. Once a catalog customer purchases from Garden.com online, they are dropped off the catalog mailing list and targeted by e-mail.